Tag archives for cognitive neuroscience

When reading the title of this post, your knowledge of the world was sufficient to let you interpret the phrase “when pigs fly,” but also alerted you to the fact that it is inconsistent with much of that world knowledge: clearly, pigs don’t fly. A new study by Menenti, Petersson, Scheeringa & Hagoort localizes the…

An astonishing recent discovery in computational neuroscience is the relationship between dopamine and the “temporal differences” reinforcement learning algorithm (which Jake describes wonderfully here, and I’ve described in a little more detail here). The essential principle is that the difference between expected and received reward can be used to drive learning, and that this abstract…

There’s little evidence that “staging” the training of neural networks on language-like input – feeding them part of the problem space initially, and scaling that up as they learn – confers any consistent benefit in terms of their long term learning (as reviewed yesterday). To summarize that post, early computational demonstrations of the importance of…